How to characterize context, the foundational platforms on which development proceeds? Two important new books highlight progress in answering this key question.  The  concepts of collective action and political settlements  are core to both books, and turn out to be deeply intertwined – indeed each is the missing puzzle piece that completes the other.

This post focuses principally on one of the two books, William Ferguson’s The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality and Development, published in 2020 by Stanford University Press. The second book, Political Settlements and Development: Theory, Evidence, Implications will be published by Oxford University Press later in 2021.  It is the capstone volume of the decade-long DfiD-funded and University of Manchester-based Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) research program; Tim Kelsall is the 2021 book’s lead author. [Previews of the book’s core analytical contributions are available in two working papers produced by Kelsall and two of the book’s co-authors  – one on the theory with Matthias vom Hau, the other  on the empirical methodology, with Nicolai Schulz. The other co-authors of the book are myself, Bill Ferguson and Sam Hickey.]

Bill and I reconnected in 2015, 26 years after our paths briefly crossed at Williams College’s Department of Economics. We discovered that we had been exploring similar intellectual terrain, though from radically different perspectives: Bill as a scholar and teaching professor at Grinnell College; me as a practitioner and researcher at the World Bank. Bill’s  focus has been on how  the lens of collective action can be used  to explore a very wide range of  economic, political and social challenges. His work turned out to fill a vexing gap in the ESID program

Bill’s book is an encyclopedic synthesis of cutting edge literature at the intersection of development economics, new institutional economics and political science. It is a synthesis which transcends the synthesis genre.  It is systematic, careful in its definitions, rigorously argued. It connects the dots in a way which gives new life to the field of economic development. (Don’t just take it from me; Kaushik Basu, Dani Rodrik and other scholars have given the book glowing recommendations.)    

In a 2013 book,  Collective Action and Exchange: a Game-Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy, Bill made the case for  the far-reaching relevance of a collective action lens for the study of political economy. Here in five propositions (each supplemented by quotes from his new book) is the essence:

First, collective action problems (CAPs) are ubiquitous:

“Economic and political development requires resolution of underlying CAPs. CAPs arise whenever individuals pursuing their own interests, generate undesirable outcomes for one or more groups. Relevant groups include nations, cities, communities, tribes, clubs, companies, nonprofit and religious organizations, colleagues and friends. Examples include: addressing climate change at international, national, and local levels; reducing international conflict; deciding who makes the coffee at work or who washes the dishes at home;  reducing crime, pollution and traffic jams; providing basic public services such as potable water, roads, parks, disease control, R&D, and adequate education and health care; resolving disputes; and achieving political reform”. (p.17)

Development, and social thriving more broadly, thus depends (including in high-income countries such as the United States…..) on a society’s ability to address CAPs, on its capacity to co-operate.

Second, resolving CAPs is challenging. There are 1^st order and 2^nd order challenges:

“1^st order CAPs involve multiple manifestations of free riding and social conflict. Resolving them involves forging implicit or explicit arrangements – among parties whose interests usually differ – for distributing the associated costs and benefits….. Effective agreements require credibility, and perceived inequities within agreements often foster conflict….. 2^nd order CAPs involving arranging the coordination and enforcement that renders agreements possible….. The anticipation of problematic co-ordination or enforcement often undermines the will to negotiate or even consider any resolution.” (pp. 17-18)

Third, resolution of CAPs lies in the domain of institutions, which Ferguson (2020) defines expansively as:

“…a combination of mutually understood and self-enforcing beliefs, decision rules, conventions, social norms and/or formal rules that jointly specify or prescribe behavioral regularities….Institutions are ‘technologies’ that signal social co-ordination and prescriptions for managing conflict; they allow society and individuals to pursue long-term goals – even in the face of changing circumstances”. (p 22)

Fourth, ‘institutional systems’ can be stable for long periods of time;

“Institutional systems are relatively stable configurations of formal institutions, informal institutions and organizations that generate social regularities…..These deeply embedded mechanisms interact with distributions of power….  Shared cognitive and behavioral patterns reproduce and persist via correlated patterns of thought and activity….. These dense interactions generate a punctuated equilibrium dynamic….” (pp. 28; 35)

Fifth change in institutional systems takes the form of punctuated equilibrium

“The social choreography [which sustains institutional systems]  may adapt slowly or not at all to changing conditions….Dramatic change requires co-ordinated and often near simultaneous re-evaluative learning and reconfiguration of practices across large groups…. Yet, once change gathers momentum, once it crosses a critical-mass threshold, shifts can facilitate dramatic change”. (pp. 28; 35-36)

In our 2015 meeting, Bill described his plans for a new book which aimed to explore systematically how  differences in context shaped both which CAPs were addressed, and how they were addressed. The typological thinking he envisaged was squarely in my wheelhouse. I had been wrestling for decades,  as both researcher and practitioner at the World Bank, with the challenge of distinguishing among different contexts  – and had recently synthesized what I had learned in  my 2014 book, Working with the Grain. After completing that book,  I continued working on a variety of applications and extensions of the approach with the ESID research program, a team which shared a commitment to trying to make progress at the interface of theory and practice, adding value to each.  Bill’s work was an opportunity to bring an additional scholarly perspective to the  ESID effort; I was happy to encourage  the ESID team to work with him.

Intensive interaction among the ESID research team had revealed that our shared enthusiasm for a ‘political settlements’ perspective translated into neither a shared, precise definition of such settlements nor a shared, consistent typology. I increasingly had come to realize that, anchored as it was in the discourses of governance and new institutional economics (a reflection of both my intellectual roots and the realities of the World Bank), the approach I laid out in Working with the Grain  underplayed the role of power.

After a few years of collective angst within the ESID team,   Tim Kelsall, together with Matthias vom Hau, made a key step towards resolving this troubling ambiguity. As detailed in their working paper, they  proposed a new definition of a political settlement (PS) as:

“an ongoing agreement (or acquiescence) among a society’s most powerful groups over a set of political and economic institutions expected to generate for them a minimally acceptable level of benefits, and which thereby ends or prevents generalized civil war and/or political and economic disorder”.

Accompanying this definition was a careful effort to distinguish among three aspects of power: the power of an elite leadership bloc in relation to opponents and other influential actors; the power of leaders in relation to followers; and the extent of incorporation of non-elites. These careful distinctions among different aspects of power provided the basis for a modified typology, although some ambiguities remained as to how institutions were incorporated.

Bringing together Bill’s CAP-focused approach and the ESID PS discourse turned out to add substantial value to each. For Bill, it created the opportunity to graft onto his work a typology which had gone through multiple  iterations, both conceptual and applied. For the ESID team, engagement with Bill offered a way of bring an extra conceptual dimension to PS work. Here is how Ferguson (2020) summarizes the CAP-PS synthesis:  

“Political settlements are the foundations of social order….. The basic configuration of a PS, reflecting the distribution of power and the composition of included and excluded groups, fundamentally shapes, circumscribes, and conditions  the creation, reform, maintenance, and demise of political and economic institutions…  The two-dimensional, four quadrant PS typology points to critical, quadrant-specific tensions and sets of CAPs that condition, complicate and impede political and economic development” (assembled from pp. 37, 168, 235; 238).

To some, the above might seem abstract, only of academic interest. My experience as a development practitioner leads me to the opposite conclusion. Development practice has long been bedeviled by a pre-occupation with normative ‘best practice’ prescriptions. While the limits of ‘best practice’ approaches are now widely recognized, as the saying goes ‘you can’t beat something with nothing’.  As I suggested in Working with the Grain, to juxtapose ‘best practice’ against an argument that  “….every country is unique and that there is little to be learned in one setting that can be helpful in another is a prescription for despair. The challenge is to find an orienting framework that is capable of filling the gap between hubris one the one hand and despair disguised as humility on the other.” (p.8) 

Making this shift has been no easy task. The journey (about which I offer a personal account in this post) has been long and circuitous;  many practitioners resist typological thinking.  It is thus crucial that the proposed successor be intellectually robust. This, in my view, has been decisively addressed by Ferguson (2020) and Kelsall et. al. (2021).

Kelsall et. al. and Ferguson  build on the CAP-PS marriage, but in very different ways.  Kelsall et. al.  use the platform as the basis for elaborating and applying an empirical methodology to benchmark, track and contrast political settlements in 42 countries – and to  test econometrically the causal impact of  political settlements on development performance. (Click here for Schulz and Kelsall’s preview.)  Ferguson uses theory to explore in-depth  the relevance of a CAP-PS approach for a variety of fundamental development topics, including:

• why development is ‘unbalanced’, and generates a variety of spatial, sectoral and distribution inequalities;
• the sources of power, how unequal distributions of power emerge, and how they shape the creation, evolution and demise of economic and political institutions;
• the role of ideas, with particular emphasis on how ‘mental models’ influence political interactions and the evolution of institutions;
• how interactions between power, ideas and political settlements can lead to significant, but not insurmountable, constraints on development
• how, in settings seemingly locked-into a low-level political economy equilibrium, policy innovations might nonetheless help loosen binding constraints to development; and
• the variety of ways in which business-state relations can support development across different contexts, via different combinations of rules and deals.

Ferguson (2020)  can be a hard slog: concepts and connections cascade one after the other, relentlessly. But I found that a sustained investment of time and intellectual energy more than repaid the effort. My research and writing moves back-and-forth between laying out  over-arching conceptual frameworks, and drilling into the details of specific development problems. This hopefully has some advantages. But its weakness can be a certain amount of hand-waving, of not being clear enough about the connections between different levels of analysis. Ferguson (2020) provides solid ground: carefully constructed connections across the different parts, carefully anchored in cutting edge literature. I expect that, for years to come, his book will have a prominent place on my bookshelf, both as guide and as a source of inspiration.

2021 holds the promise of  many new beginnings, including  for work at the interface of governance and development. But how to avoid this moment becoming yet another in an endless cycle of pendulum swings  between alternating ideas?   

In the 1980s structural adjustment was thought to be the panacea which would solve development’s problems. In the 1990s the panacea was ‘good governance’.  Both  worked out badly. Much has subsequently been learned about better ways forward. This time round, perhaps we can heed the dictum that the way to avoid endlessly repeating history is to learn from it.

AA Milne, in a classic story, tells of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet’s quest to find the mythical heffalump. For development  scholar-practitioners working at the governance-development interface, the heffalump quest has been to try and give structure, without being simplistic, to the range of messy realities out of which development might arise –  and thereby to help make practical  the exhortation that policymaking and implementation should be based on ‘good fit’ not ‘best practice’.  

As a pair of important new books spell out (see here for a complementary post), the development heffalump has been sighted. The heffalump has a name, ‘political settlements’. It is well-grounded  in a coherent theoretical literature. A solid body of work fleshes it out empirically. What follows are some explorer’s notes – a personal account of part of the quest that has led to the heffalump sighting, plus some reflections on a new frontier which the quest has brought into view.  

Phase I: 1986-1997 –   pre-history.   A year spent doing research in Korea and Taiwan in the mid-1980s crystallized for me the importance of looking beyond conventional Washington Consensus development prescriptions.  Between 1990 and 1994 (having joined the World Bank),   I co-led with Pablo Spiller a research project which aimed to distil practical insights from the new institutional economics (NIE) for the regulation of utilities; the research culminated in a widely cited co-authored article, and our co-edited book, Regulations, Institutions and Commitment(Cambridge U Press, 1994).  A central conclusion:

“Utility performance turns out to be best when countries have achieved a good fit between their institutions and regulatory design, and worst when regulatory design proceeds without attention to institutional realities.”

The World Bank’s 1997 World Development Report, The State in a Changing World (for which I was part of the core team), provided an opportunity to further refine, synthesize and apply the emerging ideas about ‘good fit’. Thus, as per the 1997  WDR:

“Matching role to capability is not a simple message of dismantling the state….It involves choosing how to do things – how to deliver basic services, provide infrastructure, regulate the economy-and not just whether to do them at all. The choices here are many, and must be tailored to the circumstance of each country…. There is no one-size-fits-all formula….There are institution-intensive and institution-light approaches to regulation and industrial policy. The choice of approach might appropriately vary with a country’s institutional capability. (pp.3-4; 75)

The challenge was to turn these fine-sounding nostrums into practice.

Phase II: 1998-2008 – a search for practical entry points for governance change. The 1997 WDR helped spur a major expansion of the World Bank’s work on governance and public sector reform, including expanded programs in each of the Bank’s regional vice presidencies; I became manager of a 20+ person team providing support to governments across Africa.

The rich diversity of African countries made it crucial to find a way of thinking more systematically about ‘good fit’ options for making governance and developmental gains.  In a 2002 Working Paper, “Patterns of Governance in Africa”,  using the responses to a survey conducted for the 1997 WDR, I  constructed a typology of 22 African countries, distinguishing between political dimensions of governance (the extent of formal rule-bound-governance, and the ‘credibility’ of political authority)  and administrative dimensions (the quality of bureaucracy). A 2004 book, (co-edited with Sahr Kpundeh), Building State Capacity in Africa, World Bank Institute Development Studies (2004) sought to derive lessons for improving governance from  a variety of World Bank supported public sector reform and capacity building initiatives. Rather than begin with normative prescriptions of what  ‘should’ be done, the book focused on ‘what happened, and why’ vis-à-vis specific efforts to strengthen governance – and suggested what  might be feasible entry points across different contexts.

The framework for distinguishing among divergent governance trajectories subsequently was incorporated in the joint World Bank-IMF publication  Global Monitoring Report 2006  in a special section (for which I was lead author) on “Governance as Part of Global Monitoring”. The framework distinguished heuristically between those contexts with early gains in bureaucratic capability, and (hopefully) later gains in the quality of checks and balances institutions, and those where checks and balances led, and bureaucratic capability (hopefully) followed.  Some of these lessons were incorporated into the World Bank Group’s 2007 Governance and Anti-Corruption strategy.

Phase III: 2006-2014 – engaging with  gurus. Two sustained  encounters helped strengthen the academic underpinnings of an emerging, inductive, bootstrapped approach to ‘good fit’.In 2005, I began co-teaching a course on ‘development strategies’ at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies with Frank Fukuyama (a course I continue teaching to this day). In 2008, after three years of co-teaching , we co-authored a  paper, “Development Strategies: Integrating Governance and Growth”, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Number 5196, January 2010”.  As per its abstract, the paper “takes a broad view of the interactions between economic, political and social constraints. It lays out four distinctive sequences via which the different dimensions might interact and evolve over time, and provides country-specific illustrations of each.” The working paper provided a useful platform both for Frank’s subsequent work, and  for mine.  

In parallel,  Douglass North, John Wallis, Barry Weingast and others had begun a research project which aimed  to explore the relevance for developing countries of the analytic framework laid out their landmark 2009  book, Violence and Social Orders, The results were published in the 2013 book, In the Shadow of Violence.  (Part of the project team, I contributed a chapter on Zambia and Mozambique; the book also includes a chapter on Bangladesh by Mushtaq Khan, one of the pioneers of ‘political settlements’ analysis.)  Though their 2009 book focused principally on a transition from ‘limited’ to ‘open access orders’ (OAOs), the 2013 book had as its point of departure the understanding that:

“… the principal development problem is making improvements within the LAO framework…..The first development problem focuses on the movement of LAOs from fragile to basic, from basic to mature, and from mature into the doorstep conditions. Attempting to skip these steps and focus instead on the transition from an LAO to an OAO is more likely to fail than succeed”. (p.346)

Working with the Grain, published in 2014, two years after I left the World Bank, built directly on the work with Fukuyama, and with North, Khan and colleagues. Organized around a typology for distinguishing among contexts,  one of its principal goals was to provide an orienting framework for practitioners, “…capable of filling the gap between ‘best practices’ hubris on the one hand, and, on the other, the despair disguised as humility [that follows from] the notion that every country is unique and that there is little to be learned in one setting that can be helpful in another”.  (p.8) 

At least on the surface, there was strong momentum within the World Bank to put into practice the ideas which had been incubating over the previous decade: over 300 staff signed up to participate in  an in-house ‘political economy community of practice’; ample funds were made available for country and sector teams to incorporate political diagnostics into their operational work. In practice, though, for reasons explored in depth by Carothers and Gramont (2013), there continued to be sharp limits on the part of most in the Bank to embrace political economy work, beyond generality and lip service.

Phase IV: 2012-2020 – refining. 2012 saw the commencement of the Effective States and Inclusive Development research program, a 26-country  partnership, funded by DfiD, and based at the University of Manchester;  I worked closely with ESID throughout the subsequent eight years.  The ESID team was committed to working at the interface of theory and practice, adding value to each; ‘political settlements’ analysis provided the organizing conceptual framework.

Within a few years of start-up it became evident that the ESID research team’s shared enthusiasm for a ‘political settlements’ perspective translated into neither a shared, precise definition of such settlements nor a shared, consistent typology.  After a few years of collective angst, the  team settled on a new definition of a ‘political settlement’ as:

“an ongoing agreement (or acquiescence) among a society’s most powerful groups over a set of political and economic institutions expected to generate for them a minimally acceptable level of benefits, and which thereby ends or prevents generalized civil war and/or political and economic disorder”.

Later in 2021, Oxford University Press will publish ESID’s capstone book, Tim Kelsall et al Understanding Development: the Promise of Political Settlements. (In the  interim, Kelsall’s co-authored  working papers –one on the conceptual framework, with Matthias vom Hau;  the other on the empirical methodology, with Nicolai Schulz – provide an overview.)  William Ferguson’s 2020 book, The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality and Development is an ambitious effort to integrate political settlements and the analysis of collective action. (See here for my summary overview of that book’s core ideas.) In my view, the above definition, its elaboration and empirical application together  comprise a landmark in the maturation of political settlements analysis – a sighting of the Heffalump.

Lessons and new frontiers. Over the past half-dozen years, my thinking has evolved vis-à-vis both the ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ aspects of the typology laid in  Working with the Grain.  Considered from a static perspective, the WWG typology can be viewed as a way to categorize  country types, with “distinctive incentives, constraints and frontier challenges and thus distinctive ‘good fit’ policy actions that are both worthwhile and feasible, given country-specific realities”.  The WWG typology is best viewed as an example of ‘ideal-type’ thinking – a  simplifying device which is not intended to be comprehensive. There is, however, one key distinction – between power and institutions – which is blurred in WWG, and on which (spurred in large part by the ESID program)  my thinking has evolved substantially.  

As a complementary post (linked here) details, the insights which Bill Ferguson brought into the ESID program were key to clarifying the power-institutions nexus. As per Ferguson:

• development challenges can usefully be framed in terms of collective action challenges;
• whether and how these challenges are resolved is shaped by power;
• institutions provide the mechanism for resolving  collective action challenges;
• strong pre-existing institutions can support resolution; and
• pressure on institutions can result from misalignment between the structure of power, and the distribution of outcomes supported by the prevailing institutions, the institutions

The last of these  has important implications for how development trajectories unfold over time.

WWG’s approach to the longer-run was optimistic; it focused “on how governance and growth interact…framed in terms of a virtuous circle:  initiating change, building momentum, sustaining momentum”.  Virtuous circles are nice, of course – indeed, a central purpose of an incremental, with-the-grain approach to policymaking and implementation is to sustain a positive trajectory.  But if imbalances between the allocation of power and the distribution of benefits become too large, the result will be crisis – and on this (and on ways out of crisis) WWG had little to say.

Spurred by the crises which many countries the world over have confronted in recent years (not least the two countries with which I am most intimately connected, South Africa and the USA), a central pre-occupation of my recent work has been on development’s “crisis-renewal” watersheds. This exploration has taken me beyond WWG’s focus on institutions,  and beyond ESID’s focus on the power-institutions nexus, to a quest to better understand the ‘independent’ role of ideas. Depending on the context, ideas can be  glue holding a political settlement together, a source of rigidity blocking change, a solvent unlocking change, and an effervescent inspiration bringing renewal.

This hardly is virgin terrain: Keynes, Hirschman, North and Rodrik all have made important contributions (summarized here).  The role of ideas in political settlements analysis has been explored within the ESID family,  by both Ferguson and by Tom Lavers. Insofar as I might have anything to add, my intent, following the general pattern of my work, is to move back and forth between the general and the specific. For both South Africa and the USA:  How, in recent years, have ideas  interacted with institutions and power? What role have they played in fueling downward spirals? How (in the spirit of a bias for hope) might ideas provide fuel for renewal? The hunt beckons.

While I’ve not become a born-again populist, a sea change in the tenor of political discourse has led me to explore some uncomfortable terrain: What might be usefully be learned for the task of democratic renewal from the resurgence of populism in country after country? (This is an updated version of a post originally published in January, 2020)

I have come to understand that the health of societies and polities depends on  modes of discourse which raise the stakes beyond what a narrowly pragmatic way of engaging with the world can offer. As Harvard economist Dani Rodrik put it:

“Any model of political economy in which organized interests do not figure prominently is likely to remain vacuous and incomplete….. But a mapping from interests to outcomes, depends on many unstated assumptions about the ideas of political agents”.

The way populists use ideas is far more potent as a call to political action than  a narrowly pragmatic pre-occupation with material interests. Populists frame politics as:

 “the people in a moral struggle against elites” .

Moral, emotionally-charged language fits uncomfortably with the (seemingly) reasoned discourse with which many of us are most comfortable. However, as Berkeley professor George Lakoff  has emphasized, “political thought begins with moral premises”. Rather than recoil,  the challenge for non-populists is to engage in ‘moral struggles’ in ways which can support democratic renewal, fostering hope rather than fueling rage.  

This post distills some ideas as to how this might be done, organized around  four questions suggested by the logic of populism:

• Who are the ‘people’?
• Against what do the people struggle?
• For what do the people struggle?
• How do the people struggle?

Who are the ‘people’? The notion of the ‘people’ is (as per a recent book by Columbia University’s Nadia Urbinati) a “stubborn ambiguity” at the heart of political discourse – one which populists are adept at exploiting. The ‘people’ can be characterized variously as those who enjoy legal standing (i.e. those in whose name laws are made and enforced); as the socio-historical body that lives in a specific territory (i.e. the ‘nation’); or as some subset of the broader legal or socio-historical entities. Populist leaders set themselves the task, as Urbinati puts it, of:

 “the extraction of the ‘true people’ from the empirical people… Their notion of the people corresponds to ‘the right people’: this is the only people they plan to speak for.”

Rather than separating out a sub-group (the ‘true people’) from everyone else,  a very different way of mobilizing  ‘the people’ for a moral struggle is to embrace  an inclusive vision of “we the people”, of an active citizenry.  South Africa’s ‘united democratic front‘ which mobilized against apartheid South Africa offers a powerful, recent example of a, “we the people” struggle by an inclusive, active citizenry.

‘Active’ entails more than voting in national elections; it includes engagement at local, state and national levels; in civic organizations; and, crucially, in political parties. ‘Citizen’ entails a sense of shared obligation, a willingness to play by rules shared with other fellow-citizens – and a clear, broadly accepted framework which lays out eligibility criteria and mechanisms for transitioning from non-citizen to citizen status. (yes: immigration policy….). A sense, as a synonym for active citizenship, of civic patriotism.

Against what do the people struggle? For populists, the moral struggle is against the peoples’ enemies – those who exploit the people, humiliate them, deprive them of their just patrimony. The fuel comes from anger: vanquish the enemy, and all will be well. But once an oppositional framing has been introduced, the demon of us-versus-them polarization lurks exceedingly close to the surface – and (as I explored in an earlier post in this series) the consequences of its unleashing can all-too-readily become a catastrophic downward spiral. 

Viewed from a non-populist perspective, the struggle ‘against’ need not be personalized, but could aim instead to combat entrenched asymmetries of power which undercut  equal rights and opportunities of citizens, both economically and politically.  The  World Bank’s  2017 World Development Report, Governance and the Lawlaid out some hard truths about power asymmetries and their consequences with surprising frankness. As the WDR put it:  

The unequal distribution of power—power asymmetry—can influence policy effectiveness….the negative manifestations of power asymmetries are reflected in capture, clientelism, and exclusion”.

For countries with a strong-enough institutional platform, a struggle ‘against’ could usefully focus on a revitalization of anti-monopoly policies,  and reform of the rules governing the financing of political campaigns (including limiting the role of ‘dark money’ in politics).

For what do the people struggle? For populists, the struggle ‘for’ generally is the mirror image of the struggle ‘against’ – fueled by a false promise that once the enemies of ‘the people’ are defeated,  all will be well.  By contrast, the struggle ‘for’ is central to a non-populist vision of a thriving  democracy. It is a struggle for equal opportunity and equal dignity as citizens – for a polity, economy and society within which all citizens can work to shape their own lives,  and participate peacefully in the shaping of their societies, according to their distinctive visions of freedom and justice.  It is a ‘moral struggle’, built not on resentment, but on a foundation of empathy and mutual obligation among citizens. 

Central to the non-populist struggle ‘for’ is the classic tension between markets and the public sphere. Markets offer economic freedom and a platform for accelerated economic growth –  but left unchecked are likely to be accompanied by rising inequalities and power asymmetries. An active public sphere not only sustains a level playing field, it also is the locus for economic and social policy reforms aimed at strengthening inclusion and opportunity for all citizens:

• Strengthening ladders of opportunity, via additional public investment in early childhood development; primary, secondary and tertiary education;  technical and vocational education; and on-the-job learning.
• Support to help those left behind to navigate change, including strengthened social insurance; a minimum safety net; and active labor market policies.
• Pro-active efforts at redistribution, including capital endowment and income support policies, and tax reforms which expand fiscal revenues and enhance the progressivity of the tax system

There is ample scope to debate the details of each of these, to broaden (or contract) the list. Whatever the details, what is needed is an openness to far-reaching innovation, responsive to 21^st century challenges to inclusion and equal dignity – globalization, accelerating technological change, the rise of network industries, information (and dis-information) abundance,  and ongoing climate crises.

How do the people struggle? Both for populists and for non-populists, ends and means are inseparable. All-too-often, populist leaders present themselves as ‘tribunes of the people’, who uniquely manifest the peoples’ will  –  and then target democracy’s guardrails as the mechanism through which the elite establishment frustrates the achievement of what the people need.  Compromise with the enemy establishment becomes betrayal.  Concentration of power in the leader’s hands becomes the natural way to realize their vision.  The erosion of norms and institutions of restraint is a feature, not a bug.

For non-populists, by contrast, both  ends and means point in the direction of institutional stewardship, fostering co-operation rather than fueling conflict. This is well-captured in how two Nobel Prize winners, Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, define institutions, namely as:

“…humanly devised constraints which govern human interaction….. an effort to craft order, thereby to mitigate conflict and realize mutual gains.”

As means, institutions provide the necessary foundation for an inclusive economy and society, capable of offering  equal opportunity and the prospect of a better life for all their citizens. As ends, commitment to equal dignity is inseparable from waging a moral struggle in ways which respect guardrails of restraint on the abuse of power.  

Insofar as respect for institutions is central to the way in which non-populists struggle, it seemingly poses a dilemma –  requiring them to struggle against toxic populism with one hand tied behind their back. Might it not be better to defeat toxic populism by fighting fire with fire? Perhaps surprisingly, as the last post in this series explores, the answer is an unequivocal “no”.

We cannot know our own country unless we see it in relation to somewhere else. For those of us who came to the USA from countries with more difficult histories, what currently is unfolding is a flashing red light, a wailing siren, a five alarm fire.

“America’s institutions remain strong” was a refrain I heard repeatedly in recent travels outside my usual professional and social bubble. This view, and the complacency it fuels, is profoundly misguided.

Institutions – “humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction” –  are anchored in a shared commitment to limit conflict.  The checks and balances architecture  laid out in the US constitution provides a vital formal guardrail – but the foundation on which the edifice ultimately rests comprises a shared understanding among stakeholders that they will abide also by tacit, conflict-containing norms.  In today’s USA, those norms are at –  perhaps already beyond – breaking point.  When conflict-containing  norms break down, then look out below.

An increasing body of excellent scholarship has used a comparative lens to understand the USA’s governance crisis. (See HERE, HERE and HERE). In this piece, I add a personal perspective. Forty-three years ago, aged 23, I landed at Boston’s Logan airport, leaving behind a country then deeply in the grip of apartheid’s tyranny,  in search of my version of the American dream, citizenship in ‘a more perfect union’.  I continue to hope against hope that America’s better angels may yet prevail. But sustaining this hope is becoming increasingly difficult.

Two sets of entrenched habits of thought and action risk propelling the USA into an abyss. The first comprises a reckless propensity to polarize.  Integral to a thriving society is  a platform of shared commitment to the common benefit, to providing the myriad public goods which underpin a thriving society.  Views will vary  as to which public goods to provide, and how to provide them. With compromise, a society can thrive. But if protagonists adopt  ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ approaches to collective discourse,  social problems fester indefinitely.  (Aficionados of game theory will recognize this as a description of the game of ‘battle’.)

Failure to address deeply-rooted social problems has been the reality in many countries –  but not, I always assumed, of the USA. Yet currently the United States finds itself unable to achieve  sufficient consensus to make progress on any of a  myriad of pressing challenges: immigration reform, health care reform (including, as the covid19 pandemic has revealed, ongoing underinvestment in public health capability); investment in infrastructure; reforms to improve learning outcomes; protection of the environment;  support for basic research; social insurance; the list goes on and on…..

At the limit,  an unbounded, unconstrained willingness to  do what it takes to impose my-way-or-the-highway solutions –   to threaten and intimidate, including the threat of inflicting massive, mutual destruction – risks a slippery slope towards disaster. (Aficionados of game theory will recognize this as a description of the game of ‘chicken’.)   The absence of a coherent public domain is not laissez faire capitalism. It is the destruction of  the institutional platform which enables a market-economy  to function. It is the loss of the  predictability which provides the basis for thriving, vibrant human life. It is an accelerating destruction of  wealth; social capital; culture; knowledge; the institutional foundations of civilization. The specter of state collapse and a descent into violence comes into view.

A second set of entrenched habits of thought and action,  a sub-species of the first, may not lead all the way to state collapse – they risk driving the USA into a made-in-America variant of state capture.  Here I have in mind a cluster of ideas and interests which demonize the public sphere.  Being non-American born, and schooled in an eclectic economics tradition,  I take for granted the virtues of a mixed economy, with distinct public and private realms. So the depth of American distrust of government has come as a surprise   – though I’ve increasingly come to understand that it has roots both new and old: new in that it has been fueled by the billions of dollars spent by the Koch brothers propagating libertarian ideas (see HERE and HERE);  old in that distrust in government has long had a hold on the American psyche,  as Gary Wills has documented.

Libertarian world views offer no adequate response to changes in the economy in recent decades,  spurred by a combination of globalization and technological change (see HERE, HERE and HERE) which have put new pressures on middle class livelihoods.  Rather than work to construct a new vision,  what has emerged among the protagonists of limited government has been the collapse of any sense of shades of gray. Inclusive policies of a kind which are uncontroversial in all other high-income countries become demonized as slippery slopes on ‘the road to serfdom’. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon become left-wing fellow travelers. This would be farcical were it not for the consequences.

A pre-occupation with keeping taxes low, at whatever price, has led to the political swamp –  an openness to policies and ideologies profoundly antithetical to what had seemed to be deeply-held national values.  What is unfolding resembles nothing so much as a made-in-America variant of state capture – a toxic hybrid of ethno-nationalism and a corrupt, praetorian politics.

Ethno-nationalism and praetorian politics draw on distinctive American legacies: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the violent white supremacist Jim Crow South (plus more genteel variants of superiority, rooted in a culturally-narrow vision of American exceptionalism). But what currently is unfolding resembles political currents which are  distinctly non-American:  the European ethno-nationalist fascist movements of the first half of the twentieth century (which in Hungary, Poland and other countries are making their own comeback);  cults of personality of a kind which are all-too-familiar in Latin American or African ‘big man’ politics.  Those of us who have lived and worked in such settings know that this generally ends badly.

***

Like most immigrants, I was drawn to America by  what seemed to be a happy combination of bold risk-taking and a pragmatic, can-do spirit, a sunny optimism. More than I knew when I came to these shores, darker impulses also festered beneath the surface; now they threaten to overwhelm.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

What drew me to America may have been an incomplete picture, but it was not false. Though currently in eclipse, the better angels of America’s nature could again be ascendant. Here is what I wish for: that the American center holds; that politicians of the center win a sweeping electoral victory, and renew the American polity, economy and society by learning from political practices which made America great in the 20^th century:

• The ‘bold, persistent, experimentation’ which characterized the far-reaching, inclusive reforms which comprised the New Deal of the 1930s – reforms which were vilified at the time by those on the right but which,  as Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself put it, “saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.”
• The non-violent activism of the 1950s and 1960s  civil rights movement, which offers an inspiring example of what can be achieved by embracing and universalizing,  rather than crashing through,  deeply-held (if imperfectly realized) American values of tolerance, respect for the individual, and the equal dignity of all people.
• A civic-minded corporate culture,  part of a broader embrace of a mixed economy –  an embrace which Yale and Berkeley political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson usefully remind us in their  book American Amnesia was a key pillar of mid-twentieth-century American prosperity  (with strong support from a variety of business organizations, including the  Committee for Economic Development the Business Advisory Council, and the American Chamber of Commerce).
• Legislative compromise in pursuit of the collective good, including Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s National Interstate Highway Act, which authorized 41,000 miles of new road construction; white southern Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s championing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and  Republican Richard Nixon’s  creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and championing of an expanded, modernized welfare system (including early support for a variant of Universal Basic Income).

These practices made America great (for many, not all…..)  in the twentieth century. Inclusive 21^st century variants could provide a platform for renewal, for building  a thriving, inclusive and environmentally sustainable society, one which offers equal dignity and opportunity for all – and, in so doing,  could make America great again.

What happens when co-operation collapses? Where might this lead? Bill Ferguson’s recent efforts to interpret political settlements analysis through the  analytical lens of collective action and game theory offers useful insights. Drawing on Bill’s work, what follows summarizes three simple ‘games’ which illustrate how a collapse of co-operation  can lead to disaster. (This piece is not wholly self-standing; its aim is to provide some game-theoretic details referenced in the principal/companion piece, “Co-operation collapses, institutions implode, consequences cascade”.

Game #1 – how an abandonment of co-operation can lead to the collapse of rule-bound governance.  As Nobel-prize-winning economic Douglass North taught us, institutions – “humanly devised constraints which govern human interactions” – comprise a system of rules. But having agreed on a set of rules, will the participants abide by them? In classic free-rider fashion, each participant could get higher benefits by defecting from the co-operative agreement; but the incentive structure induces both to defect, leaving both worse-off compared to the co-operative equilibrium.  Benefits matrix #1 above illustrates. (This is, of course, the classic ‘prisoners dilemma’ game.)   Formal check and balance institutions (including the rule of law)  comprise the classic mechanism for guarding against opportunism, including vis-à-vis  market transactions.  However, when political leaders with  control over the levers of governmental authority defect from the co-operative agreement, then  guardrails of restraint can all-too-readily give way.    

Game #2: how a collapse of co-operation can result in a failure to provide  to provide the myriad public goods which are integral to a thriving society. Public provision requires multiple stakeholders  to agree both as to which public goods to provide, and how to provide them. Views may vary; political institutions provide the decision-making mechanisms to enable stakeholders to  reach sufficient agreement to move forward.  Consider what can happen, though, if participants adopt ‘my-way-or-the-highway approaches to collective discourse.  Benefits matrix #2 illustrates with an example where both participants are supportive of provision, but differ as to their preferred modality of provision. If neither is willing to compromise the result will be non-provision, leaving both worse off. (This is an illustration of game theory’s classic ‘battle’ game.)

Game #3 – how a collapse of co-operation can produce catastrophe, including state collapse and a descent into violence. In this game, as  benefits matrix #3 illustrates, the insistence of protagonists goes beyond an willingness to compromise to achieve joint gains (in which at least one party achieves less than their potential maximum benefit. In this game (the game of ‘chicken’) each protagonist embraces an unbounded, unconstrained willingness to  do what it takes, to threaten and intimidate – including the threat of inflicting massive, mutual destruction – to force acquiescence by others to some preferred outcome. As benefits matrix #3 illustrates, if one player backs off, then bullying behavior is rewarded. However, if neither player is willing to acquiesce to the other, indeed if each is willing to go to any length, including violence, in pursuit of his preferred outcome, the result for everybody involved could be disastrous.

Hope, a vision of possibility,  is the beating heart of the American Dream. Like all immigrants, I came to the USA in search of my version of that dream, citizenship in ‘a more perfect union’. While I knew that the country would continue to fall short,  I could not have imagined  that it would risk being sucked into a vortex of nation-destroying challenges at the intersection of economics, politics and governance of a kind with which I have been pre-occupied for most of my professional life. If things go badly, the American dream could die on election day, November 3^rd, 2020.

It sometimes is said that we cannot know our own country unless we see it in relation to somewhere else. There have been many excellent efforts to  use a comparative lens to understand the USA’s governance crisis (See HERE, HERE and HERE); I have been hesitant to add to what already is a crowded genre.  Indeed, I write this piece less as a specialist in comparative governance and more as an immigrant, hoping against hope that the better angels of America’s nature, which drew me to this country, may yet prevail.

In recent weeks, I have been engaging with people whose voices are very different from those of my usual professional and social bubble. What I have learned has evoked a sense of urgency. For those who have come from countries with more difficult histories, what currently is unfolding is a flashing red light, a wailing siren, a five-alarm fire.    So I have been startled by  a continuing belief among many that somehow America’s current distemper will magically disappear, that American exceptionalism will continue to shower the freedom, privileges, optimism and affluence which have brought so many (myself included) to its shores. The result is a continuing evasion among all-too-many of hard choices –  a siren song inviting  some on the left to abstain rather than voting for Joe Biden, and some on the center right to vote for their ‘team’, the Republicans, even it they don’t much like its current leader. If this siren song prevails, we will witness the American dream transmogrifying into the American nightmare. 

Two sets of entrenched habits of thought and action risk propelling the USA into an abyss. The first comprises a reckless propensity to polarize.  Integral to a thriving society is  a platform of shared commitment to the common benefit, to providing the myriad public goods which underpin a thriving society.  Views will vary  as to which public goods to provide, and how to provide them. With compromise, a society can thrive. But if protagonists adopt  ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ approaches to collective discourse,  social problems fester indefinitely.  (Aficionados of game theory will recognize this as a description of the game of ‘battle’.)   This has been the fate of many countries but not, I always assumed, of the USA. Yet currently the United States finds itself unable to achieve  sufficient consensus to make progress on any of a  myriad of pressing challenges: immigration reform, health care reform (including, as the covid19 pandemic has revealed, ongoing underinvestment in public health capability); investment in infrastructure; reforms to improve learning outcomes; protection of the environment;  support for basic research; social insurance; the list goes on and on…..

At the limit,  an unbounded, unconstrained willingness to  do what it takes to impose my-way-or-the-highway solutions –   to threaten and intimidate, including the threat of inflicting massive, mutual destruction – risks a slippery slope towards disaster. (Aficionados of game theory will recognize this as a description of the game of ‘chicken’.)   The absence of a coherent public domain is not laissez faire capitalism. It is the destruction of  the institutional platform which enables a market-economy  to function. It is the loss of the  predictability which provides the basis for thriving, vibrant human life. It is an accelerating destruction of  wealth; social capital; culture; knowledge; the institutional foundations of civilization. The specter of state collapse and a descent into violence comes into view.

The consequence of the second set of entrenched habits of thought is almost as bleak – a cluster of ideas and interests which demonize the public sphere, and  risk driving the USA into a made-in-America variant of state capture.  As an economist I take for granted the virtues of a mixed economy, with distinct public and private realms. So the depth of American distrust of government has come as a surprise   – though I’ve increasingly come to understand that it has roots both new and old: new in that it has been fueled by the billions of dollars spent by the Koch brothers propagating libertarian ideas (see HERE and HERE);  old in that distrust in government has long had a hold on the American psyche,  as Gary Wills has documented.

Libertarian world views offer no adequate response to changes in the economy in recent decades,  spurred by a combination of globalization and technological change (see HERE, HERE and HERE) which have put new pressures on middle class livelihoods.  Rather than work to construct a new vision,  what has emerged among the protagonists of limited government has been the collapse of any sense of shades of gray. Inclusive policies of a kind which are uncontroversial in all other high-income countries become demonized as slippery slopes on ‘the road to serfdom’. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon become left-wing fellow travelers. This would be farcical were it not for the consequences.  

A pre-occupation with keeping taxes low, at whatever price, has led to the political swamp –  an openness to policies and ideologies profoundly antithetical to what had seemed to be deeply-held national values.  What is unfolding resembles nothing so much as a made-in-America variant of state capture – a toxic hybrid of ethno-nationalism and a corrupt, praetorian politics.

Ethno-nationalism and praetorian politics draw on distinctive American legacies: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the violent white supremacist Jim Crow South (plus more genteel variants of superiority, rooted in a culturally-narrow vision of American exceptionalism). But what currently is unfolding resembles political currents which are  distinctly non-American:  the European ethno-nationalist fascist movements of the first half of the twentieth century (which in Hungary, Poland and other countries are making their own comeback);  cults of personality of a kind which are all-too-familiar in Latin American or African ‘big man’ politics.  

Those of us who have lived and worked in such settings know that this generally ends badly.  Indeed, in what one hopes against hope are the death pangs of the Trump administration, what we  are witnessing is all too familiar:  the fueling of identity-driven anger and fear; an effort to militarize America’s cities;  an assault on  state institutions (ranging from the Department of Justice, to watchdog Inspectors General, to the United States Postal Service, and even the Center for Disease Control).  which stand in the way of Trump’s re-election.

***

Like most immigrants, I was drawn to America by  what seemed to be a happy combination of bold risk-taking and a pragmatic, can-do spirit, a sunny optimism. More than I knew when I came to these shores, darker impulses also festered beneath the surface; now they threaten to overwhelm.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

What drew me to America may have been an incomplete picture, but it was not false. Though currently in eclipse, the better angels of America’s nature could again be ascendant. Here is what I wish for: that the American center holds; that politicians of the center win a sweeping electoral victory, and renew the American polity, economy and society by learning from political practices which made America great in the 20^th century:

• The ‘bold, persistent, experimentation’ which characterized the far-reaching, inclusive reforms which comprised the New Deal of the 1930s – reforms which were vilified at the time by those on the right but which,  as Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself put it, “saved the system of private profit and free enterprise after it had been dragged to the brink of ruin.”
• The non-violent activism of the 1950s and 1960s  civil rights movement, which offers an inspiring example of what can be achieved by embracing and universalizing,  rather than crashing through,  deeply-held (if imperfectly realized) American values of tolerance, respect for the individual, and the equal dignity of all people.
• A civic-minded corporate culture,  part of a broader embrace of a mixed economy –  an embrace which Yale and Berkeley political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson usefully remind us in their  book American Amnesia was a key pillar of mid-twentieth-century American prosperity  (with strong support from a variety of business organizations, including the  Committee for Economic Development the Business Advisory Council, and the American Chamber of Commerce).
• Legislative compromise in pursuit of the collective good, including Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s National Interstate Highway Act, which authorized 41,000 miles of new road construction; white southern Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s championing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and  Republican Richard Nixon’s  creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and championing of an expanded, modernized welfare system (including early support for a variant of Universal Basic Income).

These practices made America great (for many, not all…..)  in the twentieth century. Inclusive 21^st century variants could provide a platform for renewal, for building  a thriving, inclusive and environmentally sustainable society, one which offers equal dignity and opportunity for all – and, in so doing,  could make America great again.

Nothing matters more for a country’s long-run development than how it navigates cycles of hope, crisis and renewal. This piece explores these cycles, using the examples of  two small countries, Georgia and Benin.

The longstanding focus of my governance work has been on incremental with-the-grain approaches – and I continue to believe that they are useful for sustaining forward momentum in times of stability, when inclusive growth is rapid. However, over the longer-run, the crucial difference between countries which become affluent and those which remain poor is in the proportion of time they spend growing rather than mired in crisis.  Ideas turn out to be a crucial influence on how a country cycles from growth to crisis and back again.

The centrality of ideas has been highlighted by a variety of eminent economists, including John Maynard Keynes, Dani Rodrik, Douglass North and Albert Hirschman. [See this link for an overview.] Hirschman’s notion of an ideationally-driven cycle – which he framed in  a 1974 article in terms of  a changing tolerance for inequality in the course of economic development  – has proven to be especially helpful as  a framing device in my research and teaching.  Hirschman  introduced the cycle via an analogy with being stuck in intermittently moving traffic: 

“Suppose I run into a serious traffic jam in a two-lane tunnel. After a while the cars in the other lane begin to move. Naturally, my spirits lift considerably…. Even though I […may not gain…]…. I feel much better off than before because of the expectation that I shall soon be on the move….. 

“But this tolerance…. is like a credit that falls due….Advances of others supply information about a more benign external environment…. [which]  suspends envy…. [But]  non-realization of the expectation that my turn will soon come will at some point result in my ‘becoming furious’ that is, in my turning into an enemy of the established order.  No particular outward event sets off this dramatic turnaround.”

In recent years, I have encouraged  students in my masters-level Development Strategies course at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies  to write their term papers on how this  cycle has played out in specific countries.  This blog highlights two papers – Brittin Alfred’s paper on the central Caucasus country of Georgia and Luke Tyburski’s on the West African state of Benin. Both offer potent – but radically contrasting  – insights as to the role of ideas in the Hirschman cycle.

Georgia is an extraordinary example of the power of ideas in catalyzing institutional turnaround.  In 1991, it (re-) emerged as an independent country by seceding from the disintegrating Soviet Union. Following an initial period of political and economic turmoil, the country stabilized. Since the mid-1990s, economic growth has mostly been positive, averaging in the range of 5% per annum. In the latter 1990s, the country seemingly settled into an equilibrium of steady growth plus high corruption. But the early 2000s witnessed a transformation of governance  – a transformation which, from a comparative global perspective is unprecedentedly rapid and far-reaching.  In 2002 the Worldwide Governance Indicators scored the country as among the worst-performing 5 percent of countries in its control of corruption; by 2005, it was in the top half of performers; by 2012 it was in the top one-third.

Brittin’s paper explores how an orchestrated shift in social norms helps account for this renewal.  Drawing on the extensive literature on how social norms are shaped and changed (and, especially, the contributions of Elinor Ostrom), she argues that:  

“peoples’ own preferences are constantly interacting with the preferences of others; given the opportunity to communicate and co-ordinate, people will often work together to find the most beneficial outcome – and these practices, once observed to be beneficial, will be ‘adopted’ more widely’ throughout a society.”

 What made the difference in the Georgian case was leadership, specifically the leadership provided by Mikheil Saakashvili.

Saakashvili, who become the country’s president in 2003 in the wake of the country’s Rose Revolution was, Brittin writes, “a passionate, charismatic and outrageously bold politician…. audacious enough to believe that [discontinuous] change was possible, charismatic enough to convince people of this belief, and tenacious enough to doggedly pursue converting this belief into reality”. The reform of Georgia’s traffic police illustrates how norm-shifting was achieved:

“Police would stop any motorist or pedestrian, and would shamelessly extort bribes….. Georgians would pay bribes to these police because they anticipated their fellow citizens would, and vice versa. Saakashvili launched a total assault on corruption within the police forces. Overnight, the entire 16,000 person-strong police force of Georgia was fired, and new police were brought on board. The new police were told there would be a zero-tolerance policy on corruption, and when the new force failed to adhere to this new, non-corrupt norm, they were fired again. After two rounds of firing and re-hiring, as well as drastically reducing the bloated rank numbers, police officers eventually began to get the message, and fall into line.” 

Things didn’t end well in Georgia for Saakashvili. His party lost parliamentary elections in 2012; he was forced to leave the country (and subsequently was charged with a variety of criminal offenses). But Georgia continues to be a beacon of the possibility of radical reversal of corruption. [More examples of how Saakashvili achieved this, plus a useful introduction to the  literature on norm shifts, can be found in Brittin’s paper.]

The role of ideas has been starkly different the West African country of Benin than in Georgia. The Georgian case illustrates how discontinuous changes in ideas and institutions can be mutually reinforcing. In Benin by contrast, as Luke Tyburski’s paper details,   ideas have been a source of continuity. The country has remained stable throughout the three decades since its 1990 transition to democracy  – notwithstanding moderate growth (about 4% per annum), mediocre institutions, and stubbornly persistent poverty for the bottom 70-80% of the population. To explore why this has been so, Luke reframes Hirschman’s tunnel effect in terms of three lanes:

• a privileged lane for the upper elite, comprising maybe one percent of the population;
• a lane for the salaried urban middle class, making up less than 20 percent of the population;
• the vast majority of the population is left in a third lane, which has been static for too long to remember.

Luke suggests two ideationally-rooted explanations for the seeming passivity of people in the third lane.  The first of these is deeply rooted in Benin’s  legacy as a central locale for the slave trade. The Beninese port of Ouidah was West Africa’s largest slave port, a point of exit for over one million slaves. Slavery was abolished only in 1905; forced labor remained legal until 1946. As Luke details (and consistent with Paolo Freire’s classic book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed) internalized privilege and internalized oppression continue to shape the country’s polity and society.

“No consequential dismantling of the tribes and power structures involved has taken place. The Fon in the south are largely descendants of residents of Dahomey, while the widely enslaved Gando remain in the north…. Former identities, symbolism, and relations have proven incredibly resilient….Development has also proceeded unequally, with literacy rates in the northernmost district of 25 percent, compared to 87 percent in the coastal capital.”

Luke’s second explanation for Benin’s stability distinguishes among ‘tunnel effect’ interactions between the first and second lanes, and the second and third. As he puts it:   

“Benin’s tunnel effect is more [accurately] described as a pair of elite-middle class and middle class-masses relationships. Benin’s non-elites have their eye more on the ‘second lane’ than on the elites.”

He argues that Benin’s 1990 democratization was set in motion  by first-second lane interactions –  a turn from hope to anger on the part of the urban middle class vis-à-vis the upper elites. In addition, the democratization  moment sparked a benign tunnel effect for the third lane. Gains for this lane included some stirrings of political engagement in rural areas – new village associations, and some increased participation of historically-marginalized groups in producer organizations and local elections.  But expectations remained modest. As of 2019,  structural continuities appeared to continue to outweigh democratic gains among the non-elite – although it is noteworthy that, even though 73% of the population continued to prefer democracy, satisfaction with democracy declined from 69% in 2008 to 51% in 2017.

*****

How to reconcile the seemingly opposite roles played by ideas in Georgia (as a force for change)  and  in Benin (as a buttress for the status quo)? One option is recourse to a Marxian dismissal of ideas as ‘superstructure’, concealing the deeper (class) forces at work. This is not my view. Focusing on ideas has helped me to see some hidden fault lines in development discourse.  Development concerns complex systems, and how they change. There can be long periods of stability, periods when (as I explored in depth in earlier work)  change is cumulative,  incremental. But sometimes complex systems  recalibrate discontinuously.  Tectonic plates shift; evolution makes a rapid leap. Complex social systems can have similar moments of discontinuity – and at such moments  the direction of change is shaped by contestation over ideas. We currently are in the throes of one of these discontinuous moments. It is at the level of ideas that the path ahead will be shaped, for good or ill.

The role of ideas as drivers of change is becoming increasingly central in my teaching and writing on comparative governance. This post summarizes, for reference, six sets of contributions which have been important influences on my thinking in this area.

1: Dani Rodrik’s recent writing.After decades as an eminent exponent of the centrality of incentives and institutions in shaping development, in recent years Rodrik has shifted direction. As he put it in a 2014 article:

“Any model of political economy in which organized interests do not figure prominently is likely to remain vacuous and incomplete….. But a mapping from interests to outcomes, depends on many unstated assumptions about the ideas of political agents”.

Rodrik’s recent work with Sharun Mukand (see here and, for a more technical version, here) is a powerful exploration of how the interaction between two  channels of ideational politics – a ‘worldview channel’ aimed at shaping citizens’ understanding of how the world works, and an ‘identity channel’  aimed at shaping citizens’ perceptions of who they are – comprises the basis for toxic populism.

2: John Maynard Keynes highlighted ideas – specifically our fluctuating expectations of what the future holds – as central to his classic analysis of the business cycle. Here’s how he put it:

“ Our theory of the future, being based on so flimsy a foundation, is subject to sudden and violent changes. The practice of calmness and immobility, of certainty and security, suddenly breaks down. New fears and hopes will, without warning, take charge of human conduct…..”

Click on this link for more detail.

3: Albert Hirschman identified shifts in ideas in relation to inequality as key to  Latin America’s turn from the hopeful times of the 1950s and early 1960s to  the angry 1960s and early 1970s. He argued  that:

“Tolerance for inequality is like a credit that falls due….It is extended because advances of others supply information about a more benign external environment….This produces gratification [which]  suspends envy…. [But]  non-realization of the expectation that my turn will soon come will at some point result in my ‘becoming furious’ that is, in my turning into an enemy of the established order.  No particular outward event sets off this dramatic turnaround.”

More detail via this link.

4: How the mind works. A rapidly expanding literature on how humans think explores the ubiquity of cognitive biases. The 2015 World Development Report, Mind, Society and Behavior usefully summarized these biases as resulting from our propensities to think automatically, to think socially, and to think with mental models. Key contributions which provide a basis for the WDR include Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes.  Robert Sapolsky’s Behaveprovides a comprehensible, accessible review of the voluminous research.

5: Internalized privilege and oppression. A direct line links Paulo Freire’s classic 1970 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed to Alice Evans 2018 World Development article, “Politicizing Inequality: the Power of Ideas”. I have long been inspired by South African Steve Biko’s vision that the end of apartheid would liberate whites as well as blacks, as whites “…realize that  they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.”

6: Douglass North. Late in his career, especially in his 2005 book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change,  North moved beyond his longstanding focus on institutions to explore also the role of ‘mental models’ in shaping long-run development. By contrast to Keynes and Hirschman, who focus on the changing, ephemeral nature of ideas,  North emphasizes the ways in which their ‘stickiness’ can inhibit a society’s capacity to adapt. He suggests (pp. 116-7) that:

“We are continually altering our environment in new ways, and there is no guarantee that we will understand correctly the changes in the environment, develop the appropriate institutions, and implement policies to solve the new problems we will face…..We tend to get it wrong when the accumulated experiences and beliefs derived from the past…… the set of mental models, categories and classifications of the neural networks through which the new evidence gets filtered….  do not provide a correct guide to future decision-making.”

As North reminds us, though, ideas don’t lock in only because of limits in the adaptive capability of neural networks:

 Dominant organizations (and their entrepreneurs) may view the necessary changes as a threat to their survival. To the degree that the entrepreneurs of such organizations control decision-making, they can thwart the necessary changes….”

How? Via the propagation of ideas –  for example, as per the recent work of Mukand and Rodrik, via a combination of identity and worldview memes which induce low-income voters to support policies which leave them worse off, and benefit the wealthy. 

Ideas matter, North tells us,. And, he also tells us, the intersection of ideas and power can be decisive.

[See the post linked here for an application of some of these ideas by two of my SAIS students to Benin and Georgia.]